[Bugfix] Game crashes when equipping off-hand weapons

Comments

I am not sure if this is considered a bug, but when you dual wield, no matter if you turn left or right, your weapons won't change their position. In other words, if you wield a blue sword in your main hand and a red sword in your second hand, no matter which side you turn(left or right), your blue sword will be closer to the view, and your red sword will always stay in perspective.

@Djimmy - what you see is called "mirroring" and using it was a deliberate design choice on the developers' part when BG2 was created. It's the same effect that makes shields always appear in the foreground no matter which direction your characters are facing. Without the source art assets, there is no way for Overhaul to remove mirroring from BG2 animations (BG1 animations were not mirrored, but they lack support for dual-wielding; see here for more information).

@Bhryaen - whenever I see this thread's title in my profile my heart leaps because I think a dev finally said something like "Hell yeah, this is so fixed it's almost ODing!". Don't play this kind of tricks on my old, weak heart :P LOL

I agree that an enhanced Baldur's Gate should be able to support the game's original animations without crashing the game where new rules are implemented (such as dual wielding). I would be interested if your solution is functional, @ScottBrooks.

Yeah although 1pp is in, it's not infinity animations, so i was hoping that infinity animations works with BG:EE.

Even if they don't manage to fix the crashing issue, however, i'm sure many of us would prefer just not to dual wield instead of getting stuck with the BG2 avatars. It's reaally a small price to pay for me.

So my hopes are either they implement BG1 animations as an option enabled in whatever way (even editor), or Infinity Animations is compatible with BG:EE, with everything upscaled and all to current resolutions.

Let's see what happens, although i'm curious as to why they can't answer yet, they must be probably up to something o_O

@Mornmagor - the lack of an answer is probably due to 18th September being so close. The devs are buried waist-deep into the code, trying to make the game ready to ship by that date. Something like fixing BG1 animations for modders to use/restore/meddle with is low priority and will likely get done post-ship. Not that I would mind, so long as we eventually get them

@bigdogchris - my previous post is not accurate; it has occurred to me that weapon animations are missing for both the main hand and the off-hand, and should therefore be made before BG1 avatars can display two weapons simultaneously (albeit not swinging with any of them).

@Ward - Not really. That's what I did with IA last time I played EasyTutu. You can restore BG1 animations and use them without dual-wielding, no problem. If you equip an off-hand weapon, however, the game will crash.

@Ward - Shields are all right, just as the were in vBG1 IA has a component that restores BG1 animations to all characters that: a) do not have an off-hand weapon equipped; b) do not have pips in two weapon fighting. There are characters that automatically get pips in two weapon fighting in the ToB engine (e.g. Minsc, being a Ranger). I used ShadowKeeper to restore BG1 avatars for them too (I wouldn't make Minsc dual-wield anyway).

@AndreaColomboDo know the actual reason why it crashes? Like is it looking for assets that simply aren't there in BG1's animations? If so I wonder if we could do it anyway but leave in the BG2 dual wield animation. When dual wielding you'd suddenly look like a BG2 insectoid and suffer mirroring, but at at least no crash and full restoration of BG1 animations without sacrificing dual wield. Just wondering really...

@Bhryaen - the reason(s) for the crash are listed in the OP. The CTD is supposedly caused by the game trying to fit 9 characters in a 8-character file. Scott Brooks was looking into a solution for this last time he posted in this thread.

Then, if the devs really wanted to be modder-friendly and very very very nice, they would have to alter the struct of BG1 character animations to enable them to display a weapon in the main-hand and one in the off-hand simultaneously. As it is now, only one weapon can be displayed at a time.

As for the missing animations: main-hand weapon animations can be copied from the existing ones; off-hand weapon animations can be created by flipping and repositioning main-hand animations with DTLCEP; attack animations... that's a can of worms. @Miloch suggested they might be borrowed and adapted from BG2 attack animations, but to test this, all other matters need be resolved (and BG1 character animations should be added as game resources to BG:EE, albeit unused, for modders to use).

I had a bit of fun/dread researching this when originally requested, the OP details are my own from personal messages and the IA thread at SHS.To add a little to what I tested with ToB, I fixed the 9 character issue easily with TobEx. However, what that meant was that I had to fish for animations to use. I tried a few, such as the standard BG2 playable character weapon animations for offhand. What happened was that the game didn't crash (!), but the weapons appeared in totally incorrect positions relative to the character. Furthermore, the animation code supports only one weapon equipped at a time, so dual-wielding in the inventory still looked like single wielding with a telepathic mind in the game.

@Demoss - The devs will not make BG1 character animations dual wield. There is no time for that and even if there were, the costs vs. the benefits would be too high for them. Hence, BG:EE will not use BG1 character animations by default.

What the devs can do is to enable modders to do the missing animation work by eliminating the limitations that currently prevent it. If they do, I can try to add the missing animations (which are a lot and will take A LOT of time) and make those avatars eventually dual wield. That is, if I can spare the time (what with my new job and moving abroad this very week); otherwise, I hope someone else will.